2014-05-08

Brrrrks

This roman à clef slash allegory about a young BYU student has been interesting to watch unfold. I think I knew where it would end up before the author did (or at least before the author admitted he knew where it would end up. And it's been interested to watch the MoHo community come out and support the book. Ben consulted with me regarding the ethics of letting people assume the book was in fact about a Now! BYU student and he followed my advice, but catching up now on the last couple weeks of posts, there are a number of commenters who seem so emotionally involved in the story that I wonder, retroactively, if some sort of disclaimer mightn't have been more appropriate. Ah well.

At any rate, I imagine this book will be more successful at proselytizing young Mormons to atheism than to the mutant lifestyle. It is certainly a trememdous piece of propaganda though, largely because of its honesty and "real"ness from the very beginning. Real characters undergoing real change will always inspire readers to feel as they feel.

I anticipate the posts being collected and reformatted and released as an ebook in the near future. So if you don't like reading backwards, you will soon be in luck.

I can't remember how I heard about De Vries even though it was only a month ago. Looking at him online now, I suspect I decided to read him as America's funniest-yet writer of religion. But the local library system is down to two volumes---neither of which, do I think, is specifically religious. But the two left are the one about sex (this one) and the one with the best title. So I checked them out.

It's a classic example of midcentury humor and thus can largely be skimmed. The character is erudite and much too aware of it and while amusing, it is also tiring.

The other worth-talking-about aspect of this book is its engagement with changing sexual mores. It's aged peculiarly and makes me wonder if writing about contemporary sexual mores will always be the surest way to age a book. That said, he did hit upon some [I refuse to commit to any particular adjective] ways to describe acts of hankypanky. E.g.:

What memories. Snooky laughing gently as I reached my peaks, with a woman's deep, deep joy at bringing a man to such ecstasy. Snooky drinkiing off a last lingering dewdrop, squeezing it forth like sap from a flower stem. She said she plagiarized the gesture from Lady Chatterly's Lover, though I have scoured my copy in vain for the precedent.

I don't know how our angry duchess compares to the prurient novels of Roth or Updike, but there you go.

As a novel, the structure seemed bad. The bulk of the novel is in the smalltown Midwest, then our hero goes to New York where the same laws of nature and expectation do not seem to apply as the plot speeds up without going anywhere (while going everywhere simultaneously)---the universe existing primarily, it seems, to fit in such un-fit-in set pieces as satire on the theater, two men and a woman, and a man with triplets. Almost as if he'd conceived the book purely as a vehicle for those sex scenes (the flapcopy backs this theory up) and so he had to cram them in at the end. That's what happens when you spend too many scores of pages engaging in humorous rhetoric.

I put some money towards this on Kickstarter and almost immediately started to regret it. At first, I figured it wouldn't make its goal and so this was just a vote for comics. Then it made it and the updates kept coming, but instead of getting excited, pretty much everything I saw made me dread the final product. (And not in a good way.) It finally arrived with its hideous cover and I stuck it on a shelf and it might have remained their forever except the shelf was getting full and this is a big book, so I took it off and gave it a read.

And holy crap but if it isn't the best horror anthology I've read in . . . . You know, as far as multi-creator collections go, I can't think of a better one. And I'm not talking exclusively comics here.

Twenty-six stories making up almost 360 pages of content and although there are a couple soft-hitters and a couple that require me to keep this book away from the kiddos, overall, this is a fine fine collection of scary stories and one I happily recommend to anyone interested in the intersection of comics and horror. Wildly original in several places and greatly divergent from each other. These stories are all over the place (in a good way).

8 comments:

For a while there I was worried someone was going to call up the Honor Code Office or organize a protest or something. Oh well, it's done now.

For the record, I always knew where it would end, more or less. At least I knew X would end up leaving the church and BYU, because I don't see staying in either as a fully self-realized mutant to be a tenable option, and the story was always about X achieving self-realization. But I didn't know how I'd get there until I did.

I'm not sure how I feel about Mormon X being propaganda, even a tremendous piece of propaganda. Generally I'm not a fan of propaganda or proselytizing, although I wouldn't claim that I'm fully immune to the allure of either, so I won't deny your assessment of the result of my work even if that wasn't my (conscious) intent. Curiously, what makes it propaganda in your mind? Is there a way to make a character's conversion (in either direction) believable without making it propaganda? Not trying to be defensive, just genuinely curious in your perspective.

I mean propaganda in the least value-judgment way possible, though I know it's the sort of trigger word that means people will have a hard time believing me. It's generally a word to throw at someone you don't agree with, but that's a shame because it's has potential to be otherwise useful. I'm trying to redeem it, little by little. Only to undercut myself later by using it as everyone else does. Ah well.

Anyway, all I meant was basically just what you said: the goal of self-realization necessarily requires certain correlative events. And I think whenever the only way to get to C is adding A and B, then that's inherently propagandaish.

(Yes, 1+2=3, but so do 1.5+1.5 and 1+(-4) and 300/10 and √3(√3). Although X explores other options, I'm not sure the story really allows him to arrive anywhere but 1+2. But then fiction is inherently frozen, so this is an argument that can't be won. It's purely a matter of gut.)

Okay, I see what you mean. The story is set up to convince the reader that X made the only choice he could, without recognizing the validity of other options. It's not set up as "X chooses one of many viable paths." I've even admitted above that I don't believe there are other viable paths, and of course I presented a world that conforms to my worldview.

Knowing that it was coming from you, I really did take propaganda in the least value-judgment way possible, but I'm used to using it in the pejorative sense, so it took some brain twisting to make it work. I think I'm on the same page as you know. Except that 1+(-4) does not equal 3. It equals -3.